Page 56 of The Unlovable Lady

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The Danforths’ second evening party of the Season was quite as ill-organized and quite as warm as their first had been. James went to it gladly, and took up his old station near the punch. There were people in the room who had come only to be coolly civil, and there would always be such people now. In this house they were outnumbered.

He was thinking so, idly, when Miss Phoebe Faulkner came in.

She came alone — that is, she came with the Danforths’ people and not with her own, and the difference was the point. No Countess at her elbow, no Cassandra at her shoulder steering her toward the right half of the room. She found Stephen Danforth with her eyes and went straight to him, without once glancing back to see who watched her do it.

“Miss Phoebe,” Danforth said, and his whole plain face opened. “You came.”

“I came.” She was a little out of breath, as a person is who has done the brave thing quickly, before her courage could go. “I told Mama I was coming. I did not ask her, Mr. Danforth. I told her.”

“You told her?” He blinked at her. “And what did she say?”

“She was not pleased. She said a great many things, most of them about you and the size of your prospects, and the smallness of mine if I went on as I was going.” Her voice wobbled, but her chin came up. “And Cassandra would not look at me at all, which is worse. Mama at least troubles herself to be angry. Cassandra will not even do that.”

Danforth opened his mouth, but she went on before he could speak.

“And I came anyway. I am tired of being the daughter who does not make trouble! I have made nothing but trouble this fortnight, and I sleep a great deal better for it.”

Danforth was quiet a moment, looking at her, and when he spoke, the easy teasing had gone clean out of his voice.

“You need not have come to be brave for me,” he said, low. “I should have waited. I told you I should wait, and I meant it. I do not want you to lose your mother on my account, Phoebe. I am not worth a mother.”

“You are not asking me to lose anything.” There was no hedge in it anywhere, and James, half a room off with his punch, marked that the girl who used to keep her opinions to herself had said that one out loud, whole, where anyone might hear it. “You keep saying the cost is yours to spare me. It is not. It is mine, and I have looked at it, and I have decided it, and I should be obliged if you would let me have decided it.”

“Phoebe —”

“I have spent my whole life having my decisions made for me by people who were quite sure they knew the price of things better than I did. I do not want my husband to be another of them.” She stopped, and went scarlet, having heard the word a half-second after it left her.

She did not take it back. James saw her not take it back, and knew he would tell Rosalind of it after.

“I am not choosing you because it is brave,” Phoebe said, her chin still up. “I chose you first, and then I had to find the courage to match it. That is the right way round, Stephen, and I shall not have it told the other way.”

Danforth looked at her as though she had handed him something he had not known he might keep.

“Say it again,” he said. “Not the brave part. The other word.”

“I shall not say it again in the middle of a room!” But she was smiling now, the color high in her cheeks. “I have only just learned to say a thing plainly, Stephen. You must allow me to do it in the right places. I shall say it again somewhere there are fewer oranges.”

The kissing-bough hung where the Danforths had hung everything else, which was wherever the most people were. James saw Danforth glance up at it, and then down at her, and hold himself back from pressing the matter, for it was the man’s whole nature to offer and then to wait.

There was no pressing wanted. Phoebe had seen the bough too, and Phoebe was not waiting for anyone’s leave. She tipped her face up to the green and the white berries and the plain warm man beside her, and she chose him, openly, in the middle of a lit room, with half of the Season’s coolness somewhere behind her shoulder. Stephen Danforth bent his head and kissed her beneath the bough.

James looked away to give them what privacy a crowded room could spare, and gladness spread through his chest all the same. It was the kiss of two people too glad to hide it, brief and tender. It had cost her a great deal, and it had frightened her not at all, and the not being frightened made all the difference in the world.

He turned his glass in his hand and did not drink it, and let them have the bough.

Across the room, Rosalind had seen it too. He found her eyes over the heads of the company, and her face had gone soft and open in a way her family had spent six-and-twenty years teaching her never to allow.

James lifted his glass to her, the smallest fraction of an inch, where no one else would mark it. She lifted hers back.

He set down his punch and crossed the room to her.

Chapter Eighteen

Rosalind paused in the doorway of Augusta’s small front parlor on the morning before Christmas Eve, and her eye went straight to the greenery. A swag hung too high, a sprig of holly drooped, and the kissing-bough tilted a little to one side.

Charlotte had hung half of it laughing, and Phoebe the other half, and Rosalind did not wish a single sprig of it moved. A month ago her hands would have gone to that bough before she had crossed the threshold.